Research in engineering

 In many parts of the world, it is generally accepted that one needs at least a Masters degree to be able to be employable as an engineer. In some countries it is even a requirement for professional registration. This embeds the practice of engineering research in the discipline, and ensures a constant stream of new knowledge, techniques and understanding. In Africa, a postgraduate degree is less common among professional engineers, and the whole ethos of engineering research is far less developed, even in academia, where staff spend much of their time and energy in undergraduate teaching.

A prototype structure nearly complete at Wits University

This is completely understandable in a region that has a severe shortage of engineers, to the extent that it negatively impacts on the maintenance of infrastructure, the launching of new engineering projects and the development of industry. As soon as a young engineer has a first qualification, sufficient to register as a professional, she or he will tend to want to enter the profession as a practitioner, rather than continue with postgraduate studies.

However, research is a fundamental to the engineering discipline, to the extent that modern engineering would not even exist without it. In the past, while many cultures managed to achieve great "engineering" feats, these came about through empirical methods - trial and error, with small incremental improvements from one project to the next. There were quite a few negative aspects to this: firstly, the "error" aspect of "trial and error" often signified serious failure, often with loss of life; secondly, improvements from one project to the next were circumscribed by caution (to minimise the possibility of failure), so progress was necessarily very slow; and thirdly, engineering design had to be quite conservative in the use of materials, resulting in very heavy, bulky solutions that used a lot of material.

With scientific research, new materials such as concrete and steel could be invented and tested for reliability, allowing for much larger and more materially efficient designs, as the new materials could be developed and tested in lab conditions that could make them more and more predictable. This led to the invention of many more new materials with different properties to meet a variety of applications and priorities, and in parallel with the lab research was a far more rigorous mathematical approach, again the result of research, often backed up with experimental work.

Up to now, engineering research has been dominated by the political north, although recently much work has been done and published in India and China. This legacy has largely been driven by the needs of very wealthy countries and funded by their established industries. The problem for less wealthy countries is that the priorities are often very different and what may be an optimal solution in Norway, may not be ideal in Namibia. 

The success of modern engineering can be attributed to one single concept, that of optimisation. An engineering problem will have many facets, and the engineer's job is to weigh up and balance all these factors, using the products of engineering research to be able to quantify and justify this optimisation before the project even begins to take shape. In less wealthy countries, socio-economic considerations, resource availability, climate and culture should all play into this process, yet for the past centuries, the priorities across the globe have been defined from a Western perspective. This can be attributed in part to political factors, colonialism being an obvious driver, but in part it is a reflection of the dominance of the West in engineering research. 

Without a body of research that reflects local climate, resources, socio-economic and cultural environments, engineering in these less wealthy countries will struggle to create optimal designs in terms of local priorities and concerns. Ideally, this research would be conceptualised and conducted by engineers who have grown up within these environments, as those best placed to have a deep understanding of the nuances of the situations in which they grew up.